More than a month’s worth of rain fell in just 12 hours as Tropical Storm Ketsana slammed ashore in the Philippines, killing at least 40 people and stranding thousands on rooftops in the capital’s worst flooding in more than 42 years.
The government declared a “state of calamity” in metropolitan Manila and 25 storm-hit provinces on Saturday, said Defence Secretary Gilberto Teodoro, who heads the National Disaster Co-ordinating Council. That allows officials to withdraw emergency money for relief and rescue.
A landslide and flash flooding in nearby Rizal province killed 35 people, said provincial government spokesman Tony Mateo. Most of the fatalities in Rizal drowned, said Loel Malonzo, chairman of the Provincial Disaster Co-ordinating Council. Three people were also reported killed in Manila’s southern suburb of Muntinglupa and two others in Quezon city, said Anthony Golez, deputy presidential spokesman and acting head of the Office of Civil Defence.
Mr. Mateo said that 27 people were missing.
President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo had to take an elevated commuter train to the disaster council office to preside over a meeting because roads were clogged by vehicles stuck in the floodwaters.
The mayor of Cainta, also in Rizal, who was stranded atop a dump truck on a road that was neck-deep in water, told ABS-CBN television by phone that many residents climbed onto roofs to escape.
“The whole town is almost 100 per cent underwater,” Mayor Mon Ilagan said.
More than 42 centimetres of rain fell on metropolitan Manila in just 12 hours on Saturday, exceeding the 39.2-centimetre average for September, said chief government weather forecaster Nathaniel Cruz. The rainfall on Saturday also broke the previous record of 33.4 centimetres, which fell during a 24-hour period in June 1967, he said.
“However good your drainage system is, it will be overwhelmed by that amount of rainfall,” he told The Associated Press.
He said poor maintenance of drains and waterways clogged with garbage compounded the problem.
ABS-CBN television showed a dramatic video of more than a dozen people perched on roofs of damaged houses being swept away by the suburban Marikina River. They smashed against the pillars of a bridge and were separated from each other in the rampaging river. It was unclear whether they were rescued.
Mr. Cruz said seasonal monsoon rains were intensified by Ketsana, which packed winds of 85 km/h with gusts of up to 100 km/h when it hit land early Saturday. By the evening, the storm maintained its strength as it moved over the coast of western Zambales province and headed west toward the South China Sea.
Manila airport operations chief Octavio Lina said the runway had been flooded, delaying international flights for hours. Floodwaters also caused some electrical outages.
Hundreds of vehicles were stalled in flooded streets around the capital, and nearly 2,000 passengers were stranded in ports in several provinces south of Manila after the coast guard suspended ferry operations.
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